Transcript



Animation Alliance UK

Panel at Animated Encounters, Arnolfini, Bristol, 16 November 2011.

Joan Ashworth (animation director and Profess of Animation at the Royal College of Art)

Sara Barbas (animator, writer and director)

Miles Bullough (Head of Broadcast, Aardman Animations)

Sarah Cox (animation director and producer at ArthurCox)

Gary Thomas (Animate Projects, and AAUK coordinator)

Gary: Thank you all for coming. I’m Gary Thomas from Animate Projects. We established Animation Alliance UK earlier in the year to advocate for the recognition - and support - of independent animation in the UK. We wrote to the government’s Film Review, and that report will be published in the new year. We alerted them to the crisis in support for UK independent production, and this is our first public event at which I hope we’ll be able to discuss just what the Alliance’s priorities should be - what is needed, and how to we set about getting something done.

It’s great to be doing this in the context of Animated Encounters, and it’s a great thanks to Kieron and Liz from the festival for suggesting and hosting the event.

Our panel is: Miles Bullough, Head of Broadcast at Aardman; Sarah Cox, animation director and producer from Bristol’s Arthur Cox; Joan Ashworth, animator and Professor of Animation at the Royal College of Art, and animator, writer and director, Sara Barbas.

I first wanted to ask the panel whether we all agree that things really are quite bad?

Miles: I think back to that sort of golden age of animation - based around that incredible period of the NFTS when we had Nick Park and Snowden Fine and Tony Collingwood. The incredible generation of talent that emerged around that time was supported by Channel Four. The industry was small but it was underpinned by an incredibly proactive and vibrant commissioning policy under Clare Kitson at Channel Four and many successful companies, not just Aardman. So much successful animation activity was born out of that era.

Part of what I’m talking about in the media at the moment - the tax credit issue and overseas competition for TV animation - is a separate issue, but it is almost a perfect storm for animation at the moment, where we have pretty much the total disappearance of funding, certainly at that level that was enjoyed 20 years ago. The issue of where is that breeding ground for new talent is equally important to a company like Aardman and other companies like us, who are otherwise trying to be commercial and make big Hollywood movies or full scale television series.

Gary: Aardman and other studios support their talent to make their personal projects, but is that sustainable?

Miles: We try to, but it’s incredibly difficult. We try and make short films - and we’ve just released one called Pythagasaurus by Peter Peake - but they are made in downtime from commercials. We are supporting them, but between jobs.

We used to fund short films - actually dedicate time to them specifically - but that is incredibly hard to do at the moment. They are very expensive to make, and there is no outside support for them. We haven’t made a fully funded in-house film since The Pearce Sisters, which was four years ago. We’ve released three short recently, but those have been created in downtime.

While there is no commercial return for making short films, we believe in them, and they’ve been the lifeblood of Aardman over the years - they are how we’ve kick-started projects and developed directors, by giving them a chance to express themselves through a short film.

Joan: So they are not without value.

Miles: They are not without value. It’s paying for them.

Joan: So it’s part of your research and development. And something like Dot - that also seemed to be like research and development, but for a camera company, or a phone company. I just wondered about research and development tax breaks. Is that something you get for researching?

Miles: No - r&d tax credits are much more about inventions, patents and things that you can hold. So with Dot, we applied a lens to the Nokia M90 camera, so we were combining technologies rather than inventing a new one. But that was basically an advert that was funded by Nokia as a short. And we were very happy to do it - and it was certainly experimental.

Gary: Presumably the r&d tax credit is about products for which there is a mass market.

Miles: Believe me, we have looked under every stone for tax credits in the r&d space, and it’s possible, but where you are developing creative ideas, it’s very hard to apply the tax credit.

Sarah: And wouldn’t the research be getting the funding not the film in that sense? As with Skillset funding for training. It’s a case of bringing lots of different funding together. But to get all that funding together takes an awful lot of time.

Miles: It’s not the answer to the funding crisis for short films. Nor for animation generally.

Audience 1: Can I ask a question? Now you described the perfect storm. Is this the culmination of both this lack of new commissions and the fact that in other countries those territories are subsidising animations, which is almost accelerating the problems for the industry?

Miles: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m referring to.

Audience 1: So if they hadn’t happened simultaneously it might have been happening more slowly and it wouldn’t have perhaps the impact?

Miles: Yes, I think it’s a really tough time. Feature animation is actually very strong at the moment. Commercials are still strong, although the competition from overseas is incredibly fierce, but again that’s more of a costing than a subsidy thing.

But specifically in television animation, the government support for animation production in Ireland and Canada and France, Benelux, south east Europe, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, the Isle of Man, Malta, Louisiana - these all have tax breaks for animation production. And some of them you don’t worry about as competitors. Malta’s a lovely place but I don’t see them as unsettling our position in TV animation. But in Ireland and France and Canada, there are some incredibly skilled and talented people and the support they are getting is a real threat to our television industry.

Gary: So are you chasing two complementary outcomes where maybe the government says yes to tax breaks but also somehow encourages how funding can be re-introduced to short animation?

I don’t like talking about dualities - saying industry is one thing and culture is another thing. But it does help explain what you are talking about. So on the cultural side of things, there is also the issue of international subsidy, where British animators can go to Canada and make films supported by the National Board of Canada, or work in Australia. It isn’t their choice to go and make films in Australia and Canada, that’s where they can make films because they can’t make films here.

Gary: Sarah, how have you managed!?

Sarah: Well, for 10 years we managed quite happily subsidising our film production. My company has directors that I work with, both commercially and with short films, and every now and then one of them will have an idea for a short film and I’ll help them get funding. And then we make it in the studio. Up until about a few years ago the money from those short films was enough to give them a living wage, enough to just cover the corner of the studio that they sat in.

But I was looking at a budget I had for a film I made with S4C about eight years ago, and it was £60,000 for a six minute film - £10,000 a minute. And now Channel 4’s Random Acts ones are £3,000 for three minutes, so it’s a tenth.

Gary: For me, in commissioning films, we are always looking to maximise things - but it was one thing to ask with a £15,000 budget if they can do it for £12,000, and they’ve got eight months. But now we have to say you’ve got eight weeks and it’s £2,000. Your S4C film was eight years ago..what since?

Sarah: We haven’t made a film in a few years. We won a BAFTA for the last one, Mother of Many, but we haven’t made anything since then. We’ve been working on features - a live action feature and the Graham Chapman Liar’s Autobiography, which lots of animation companies have been working on. But even that’s not much more than a thousand pounds a minute. And they’ve got the tax break.

Gary: Do you think there’s a difference between animation and live action?

Sarah: No, live action budgets are shit too!

Gary: But in the sense that, how Mother of Many was funded through a scheme based on a short film funding model, which is basically about training and calling-card short films. I think animation can work under those constraints but animation’s harder work, and exists as something in its own right.

I know all cinema is animation now! But live action shorts directors usually usually go through film training whereas animators come through an art school tradition, and make work in non-cinema contexts. So there are differences in practice, and of course, I think animation is an art form in its own right.

Sarah: I was just sharing a cab with someone from the BFI and we were talking about this - because all the funding at the moment is for very low budget three-minute films. These can generate a certain kind of animation - a one-off gag or a technique - but there’s very little investment in well told short stories. And so there’s very little that can lead into the feature animation, because there’s no time in three minutes to really kind of develop characters.

There used to be those ten-minute slots, ten by tens and things like that, or better funded films, that you could spend time to develop a character, develop a more involved story that might help lead into features. In France and Germany and elsewhere they are making those films, and they are really, really good. So we are competing in the same way that Miles is competing with television animation, short films are competing against much better funding, much better support in Europe.

Gary: Joan, in the Alliance letter we made the point that the three BAFTA nominations for animated short film last year were all RCA students, which of course is wonderful. But in a sense I think it’s also an indictment of support for wider professional practice. What do you tell your students?

Joan: Well, we get people in like yourself to come and talk about funding, and the students are quite realistic about working commercially to support their own projects.

They are very good at looking at opportunities; they know they are not going to get an Arts Council grant or a Channel Four grant and so they know they are going to have to patch their projects together, and that’s combined with them forming collectives, where they can support each other and work on each other’s projects. And if you can pay full rate to facilities when you are making commercials, what I’ve always done is go and say, “Look, I haven’t got any money.” And they say, “We’ll do it off rate.”

And so you are using the existing facilities houses that pay full rate to support art – and a lot of facilities houses are really keen to do that.

Miles: But then you still had some funding that would pay something.

Sarah: Now we have to ask them to do it for free.

Miles: I think the opportunities for short shorts are still there and also the technology has become so accessible and affordable that actually to make a 90-second or a 60-second piece is actually, it’s achievable, you can do that evenings and weekends, you can work in a chip shop.

But how do you develop storytellers? To develop storytellers you need people who have the challenge of a longer piece. And that’s not feasible to do in your free time or to beg, borrow and steal. You have to be funded somehow. And that’s the thing that we are missing at the moment. We see plenty of short shorts and some of them are quite promising, but there’s another step to go before that person can really be taken seriously for a long form animation work.

Joan: So does that mean there needs to be support for writers, or the writing aspect of it?

Miles: Writing is the bit you can do cheaply in a sense - it’s once you need to pull together a team and start employing people - that whole process is out of reach.

Gary: Sarah, how do you manage, or don’t you?

Sara: Just about! I’ve tried to keep a good balance between the commercial work and commissions, writing commissions or animating. And I just try to grasp every opportunity I find for other grants and bursaries and residencies, fellowships. I subscribe to every newsletter possible. So I just jump to any opportunity.

I have found recently though that these opportunities are all outside England in Europe. I did a residency in Denmark, applied for money from Media. I’m finding that if I want to make a film with which I could explore my voice as a writer/director, I’m going to need to go elsewhere. I’ve done low budget films, I’ve done a student film that did well in festivals, but now I need to take that leap and to take that leap I’m going to need proper funding.

So I actually have interest from Danish producers who, like France and Denmark and Germany, have these stable subsidies and funding opportunities. I have to go where the work is.

Joan: One of the issues is that France has been keen to support cultural output because of the French language. We are blessed and cursed with having English, which means we have potentially a large market and we don’t protect or think about British culture in the same way as the French do about French culture.

Miles: Except we think about British films, don’t we, generally? And Film Four and BBC Films invest in British film.

Sara: I think places like France and Germany can see it as a long term thing that is going to bring opportunities in different areas in advertising, it’s going to prepare directors for feature films.

Joan: They have a longer view.

Miles: But I think what we want is not just about locally specific film, but animation specific films and recognition and investment in it as a form?

Joan: Yes, and animation does have a particular way of reading culture and representing culture. We should tease that out more - it’s something that we need to better articulate to the government, so that they see it as a treasure. A rich treasure that we know is there, but we are not communicating, because we are diffused. We’ve got an industry, we’ve got a special effects industry - and then we’ve got cultural animation, or individual auteur animation. It’s so complex, the picture, we need to hone in more on the unique parts of it, so that they can recognise it, and how it ties in with some of what they are concerned with in government, such as British-ness. When you are applying for funding for anybody, you have to tie in with their criteria, and maybe we need to be feeding them the information more specifically and more loudly. That’s what the Alliance letter does.

Audience 2: I think animation still has an identity problem with outsiders. They have an abstract idea that animation is very important, and an even more abstract idea that animation is becoming more important, but nobody has a clear idea of what the object is. And I think that’s an argument that needs to be made much more forcibly.

Joan: Yes. We need to examine that and unfold it to see what is it, what is the thing. Because it’s hard to articulate, for all of us, but that’s what we need to do, isn’t it? To make it not be abstract but to be concrete.

Audience 2: There’s also a question about how wide this remit is - whether we are specifically talking about animated filmmaking, which is looking at moving towards the feature length form, or whether it’s including games, event-based installations, urban screens and so on like that.

Audience 3: It sounds as though apprenticeship - the talent - is a really important part of it. It seems as though we’ve got a great history and reputation as a nation, going back 20 years to this rich era of creative and production. I don’t know whether the talent’s still coming through in the various colleges and whether we’ve got the window to nurture that talent and allow it to learn and develop before it’s lost forever.

Joan: I don’t think that moment has gone. I think it’s having the confidence as animation artists and animation filmmakers; our lack of confidence is part of the issue.

Miles: I do think it is harder now to find really exceptional talent in colleges. Partly because universities have become so money-focused and the amount of time tutors are able to spend - and I know there are exceptions here, because I think the RCA is actually one of the really, really strong colleges at the moment - but the amount of time that people are able to spend with students is under pressure and we are finding that it’s increasingly hard to find really exceptional graduates in this country, especially when you compare them to the graduates coming out of France and Germany where the standard is extraordinary.

Sarah: It’s not that the talent’s not there, it’s just not being developed and brought out because there’s financial pressure. When I was at college there was about six of us in Liverpool, and I just went and taught in Farnham and there were 45 in the year. You can’t give as much to bring out that talent to 45 people as you can to eight.

Miles: It’s a bit harsh to say they are not good because they are good, it’s just that we’ve been so badly left behind now when you compare us to France and Germany that we are not as good in comparison.

Sarah: To get anywhere, we have to fight to find every tiny scrap of funding - that’s not being modest, that’s being really pushy. And it may be against our nature, but we are forced to be that, and the people that are making films have fought really hard to even get the budget to make a film.

Miles: But it shouldn’t be that hard is what I’m saying.

Sarah: I think it’s the way animation is perceived as opposed to art, so it’s different.

Joan: So we need some headlines.

Gary: On the basis that the economy is not about to improve, what’s the prognosis?

Dave Sproxton: Post Olympics, lottery money will be coming back into the Arts Council and the BFI, and the Arts Council is looking at digital, cross-platformy stuff. I think there’s something we do need to look more closely at and attack some of those budgets, because they’ve already got quite a big tranche and will want to get more next year.

The screen agencies are being reinvented under Creative England, and the BFI will start pumping money into talent development and script development.

I don’t think everything’s lost - we’ve gone through a bad period but there will be, post Olympics, quite a large tranche of cash coming back into those systems.

Joan: Do you think at the BFI that animation is properly represented at the moment?

Dave: I think there’s a big argument to make. The tax break argument was predicated on a cultural remit that was all about, in a way, stopping American movies dominating the UK and us getting our work out to the rest of the world. We need to look at that model again, and we can almost take out the words ‘feature film’ and put in ‘animation’ and everything else applies. But if that’s what we do, we haven’t acted – the feature film industry is pretty small, it’s got some very vocal players, the UK Film Council had very strong officers, doing very, very hard work with the government departments, the Treasury and Inland Revenue to get that break in place, realising it will support UK industry and it will bring in a massive amount of US dollars. And we need to look at how that would work for us, those are going to be really high.

But it took a lot of work. The biggest achievement there was getting the Inland Revenue to talk with Treasury. That had never happened before. These government departments don’t talk to government departments. And that’s why it’s a constant process of efficient, in finding those networks in the corridors of power, how to get those concerts to happen.

Gary: But with something like independent animation, there you have civil servants in the same department who aren’t even talking to each other. And you have the Arts Council and BFI who aren’t talking to each other. So, from what you’ve just said, maybe an idea is to begin by lobbying them to talk to each other, teach them how to spell the word ‘animation’ and then, when that other money comes on stream, whey-hey!

Miles: I think it’s also really important, if that money does come back on stream, that there’s an outlet. One of the things we should do is try and get the BBC interested again in animation. It would be relatively inexpensive for them to have set aside say 13 ten-minute slots a year funded at between £5,000 and £10,000 a minute. And that would give us the outlet which would also encourage support from the Arts Council and BFI.

Because they don’t just want to make anything for its own sake, they want it to find an audience. Given that Channel Four is effectively out of the animation business and doesn’t look likely to come back in in a hurry, I think the BBC has got to be the public service.

Sarah: We’ll go and knock on their door.

Sara: I was actually excited when I heard about the panel discussion today, because it’s like the first time that I have seen different fields of interests of animation coming together, being concerned, trying to create an alliance to have a body or a voice together within Britain to somehow become stronger. But what is it that we could do, as educators or filmmakers ourselves, how can we be of help in terms of supporting an alliance?

I mean, we are not ossified. All these old institutions are there but they are not doing anything, and I think it’s a really important thing we should make sure that the government gets the idea that animation within Britain has one of the highest profiles in the world, because it is distinct. The films do look different, they feel different, and they have a different approach. And I think that’s something so valuable that it should be supported from all sides.

Gary: The breadth and the diversity of people who signed up at the beginning was what encouraged me to bother to carry on with the Alliance. I think the diversity is the strength of what we are - that Miles and I can sit on a panel and agree about fundamental things. But that diversity also makes it harder to galvanise a group of people. But the thing is, what I am saying is, any suggestions really about what the next step might be.

Sara: Where are you heading? Are there visions?

Joan: This is an exploratory meeting to see.

Gary: I think it’s all exploratory. But as the person who initiated, I take strength from the commitment and expressions of concern. That response to my initial invitation made me think I should bother to draft a letter, then Kieron’s invitation to Animated Encounters, and this panel encourage me further. I think it’s baby steps.

Sarah: Just to build on what Sara’s been saying, the loss of all the funding schemes worries me, but the Channel 4 AIR scheme for recent graduates really worries me. It offered support to graduates at this watershed moment where if you are in the door you have a fighting chance. You know, if you are directors at Aardman, or if you are a part of Arthur Cox, then fantastic. But what about the current students?

Miles: I think the lack of an outlet for animation for me is a serious problem. For arthouse animation, for want of a better word. For artistic films that aren’t necessarily going to be commercial. And that’s what I pay my licence fee for, it’s to watch things on BBC Four that are difficult and obscure that I love. And that’s where I think we should be.

Gary: An Animation Alliance for independent animation can’t do everything, and I think there’s enough clarity about what we’ve lost in the last few years, that it’s about trying to claw some of that back.

Joan: There’s a horrible phrase that’s something like, the benign funding that’s existed has led to stagnation, and that the cuts are actually an opportunity.

Gary: Yes. I can take that with a pinch of salt, especially when the Serpentine is getting an extra £300,000 a year. It seems to me not a question of cuts, it seems to me a question of priorities and reaction and conservatism.

Sarah: I didn’t realise there was 260 of these Random Acts. It’s a lot of money. And you could maybe make 10 really good half hours.

Miles: Let’s not take the money away from Random Acts and divide it into thirty, let’s try and get another million pounds into 13 ten-minute slots a year or something on BBC Four.

Sarah: Can I ask you, what did the BFI and the UK Film Council respond?

Gary: They didn’t.

Joan: Have you not had any response at all?

Gary: I did ask the regional Arts Council office this meeting was happening, but they couldn’t come. I would hope, with Lizzie Francke and Chris Collins at the BFI, that animation is somewhere on their horizon.

Joan: Is one thing we need a meeting to talk to them?

Dave: BFI will be awaiting the film policy review. And that’s the point at which to attack – the point at which to say, you need to do some of this stuff. To go back to the BFI’s original mandate, which was arthouse filmmaking.

Dave: I think there are possibilities, because they’ve got a mandate to deliver now, coupled with the Arts Council.

I’m moderately optimistic, but you do have to keep hammering on people’s doors and actually, we need to find an easy way to make them understand what it’s all about.

Audience 3: But to go back to the talent - if students you would contribute £2 a month, maybe, for as long as it takes to create a budget where people can maybe pitch ideas to an independent body, and use the new technology and new promotional platforms to basically get your work seen.

Miles: Yes, but the economics are – you know, £2 a month, 2,600 students, so let’s say you get a 30% or 40% take-up, so you are raising £2,000 a month, say, so that’s going to fund about 15 to 30 seconds of animation.

Gary: I think crowd sourcing can be useful but it is not sustainable and it is not embedding the cultural value of animation in the culture. And I think we need to tell those people that it’s their job. Why should opera get public funding and animation not?

Miles: It’s also the perception that, in our minds, the difference between cartoons and animation is very clear. But I think to an outsider, it’s like, why do we need to fund Bug’s Bunny? We have to be clearer about animation as an art form and why that’s important, and how it’s distinct.

Joan: It’s seen as very lowbrow. I showed a film at the Royal Opera House during the Deloitte Contemporary Arts Festival, and one of the Duchesses, who was I think sponsor of the Royal Opera House - because it was a film that was showing - she carried on talking. Because it wasn’t a live performance. She was talking loudly whilst the film was being screened, and the head of development was trying to shush her down.

Gary: We have run out of time, so I’m going to have to say shush now. If If anyone hasn’t signed up to the Alliance, then please do sign up. And we’ll keep you posted. But thanks very much to the panel, thanks to Kieran, Animated Encounters, and thanks to you all. Thank you very much.

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